The Artist and The Help gained seemingly unstoppable Oscar momentum at the weekend: The Artist triumphed at the Directors’ Guild of America Awards, while sharing the spotlight with The Help at the Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Artist director Michael Hasanavicius beat Woody Allen, David Fincher, Martin Scorsese and Alexander Payne to win the DGA trophy, cementing his position as favourite to win the Best Director Oscar.
His lead actor, Jean Dujardin won Best Actor at the SAG Awards, beating George Clooney. Only four SAG Best Actors have not secured the Best Actor Oscar, the last being Philip Seymour Hoffman for Capote in 2005.
With The Artist already having secured the PGA’s vote, it is now the absolute favourite for the Best Film, Best Director and Best Actor Oscars.
Christopher Plummer continued his unbeaten run, taking the Best Supporting Actor SAG for his role in Beginners. If he fails to win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, I’ll eat someone’s hat.
The Help’s Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer locked out the female SAG honours, as well as being part of the ensemble that secured the SAG best cast award. As pointed out by The Hollywood Reporter, The Help has tied with Chicago and American Beauty for most wins at the SAGs, but while the latter pair swept to Oscar glory, The Help will need to be happy with being favourite for the two female Oscars.
Why? As the Reporter points out, no film that has not been nominated for Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Editing has gone on to win Best Film. But the thing in The Help’s favour is that it is by some distance the most commercially successful of all this year’s ‘proper’ Oscar nominees – ie it’s more likely Academy voters have seen The Help than any other film in contention. Nevertheless, I still don’t think that’s enough.
The next major awards ceremony is the BAFTAs on 12 February with the Oscars another fortnight later.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment